Curb Magazine

Oct 2018

‘Manhattanized’ Manhattan?

Rethinking bike lanes

The 21st century signpost

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CONTENTS

06

October 2018

Has Manhattan Become Too... ‘Manhattanized?’

Is the Island too dense for its own good? By Sarah Goodyear.

Manhattan from Brooklyn. © Vinicius Frahm Illustration by Vinicius Frahm

Cover

Ville de Sète 3009 (2000),

by Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015).

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04

Let’s Rethink What a ‘Bike Lane’ Is New spaces for new modals. By Andrew Small

09

Tech: A signpost for the digital age

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Editor’s Letter: On Graffiti

12

Interview: The mind of Jaime Lerner

14

Opinion: The problem with BRTs October 2018 CURB | 3

Let’s Rethink What a ‘Bike Lane’ Is How about “light individual transport lane”?

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ometimes, you just need a good chat on the bus to get a good idea. That’s what happened tot two Portland transit gurus, Sarah Iannarone and Jarrett Walker, when they met on the Oregon city’s 10 bus this Tuesday (November 25th).

“Jarrett’s my neighbor, but he’s not all small talk,” says Iannarone, who is the associate director of First Stop Portland, an urban sustainability training program at Portland State University. She and Walker, a well-known transit consultant (and occasional CityLab contributor), got to talking about road space—you know, as neighbors do. “If we have a couple minutes, we use that to our advantage.”

The topic of the day: How to categorize and capitalize on the swarm of e-scooters that had just showed up in Portland this July. The rentable conveyances have stormed cities nationwide this summer, joining a whole host of other little vehicles that are blurring the once well-defined lines between motorized and non-motorized road users. Did they belong on roads, or bike lanes, or sidewalks? And does this scooter invasion represent a chance to reframe the distinction between these kinds of spaces? “That’s where Jarrett and I were thinking—where are the opportunities in this?” says Iannarone. “What if you had to start from scratch today with the infrastructure and you didn’t have preconceived notions, especially in downtowns in urban centers as a blank canvas. How would we carve this out?”

So after their conversation, Iannarone ran to her office whiteboard.

The two urbanists came up with pretty simple way to sort out how to allocate space, creating a few categories designating a few different vehicles based on three different speed ranges and wide, mid-width, and narrow lanes. It’s a way of rethinking how planners in the U.S. especially have allowed different modes to share the road when they don’t really fit together.

4 | CURB October 2018

“We were working out what kinds of modes should be mixing and how much space you’ll need,” she says.

“If you’re a faster vehicle, like a car or a faster cyclist, you need more vwiggle room. But a slower lane with scooters, more mellow-paced cyclists, skateboarders, and even joggers could share a whole auto lane.” She floats the idea of animals as a designation for lane designation color-scheme: gold-and-black for the fast cheetah lane, green for the tortoises in the slow lane. (No answer yet for the mid-speed lane. “You can’t use zebra stripes.”)

As Walker writes on his blog, Human Transit, he wants to think out loud about whether we should redefine our idea of bike lanes, both to build a bigger tent to include new forms of mobility and to get around the typical War on Cars rhetoric.

“All this came up because I was trying to think of the correct new term for “bike lane” as we proliferate more vehicle types that run more or less at the speed and width of bicycles but are clearly not bicycles, such as electric scooters. The two logical terms seem to be narrow lane or midspeed lane. One way or another the two concepts will need to track with each other.

I wonder if this kind of language can make our sense of the role of these lanes more flexible, and thus less divisive.

Iannarone also asked people on Twitter how we might define an all-inclusive term for this kind of travel. “What do you want to call this stuff? It’s not quite active transportation, not microtransit,” Iannarone says. “I liked suggestions like ‘low-impact transport’ and ‘light individual transport’ because it can get an acronym: LIT.” With scooters collapsing the distinctions that divide drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, she sees an opportunity to “ride that wave into government,” she says. “People love these things, so let’s make space from them.”

One key to this approach: building a bigger constituency for urban road and sidewalk space. “We have to think about the allocation of urban space and how we’ve had to fight for modes since the automobile era,” she says. “Retrofitting that space for modes other than auto has been a slog, and a lot of that has been because they haven’t had the numbers. Cyclists haven’t had critical mass to demand a fair allocation of urban space. It’s not just a matter of being fair numerically, but also fair from a safety perspective, so that the people that are engaging in other modes besides driving don’t have their lives threatened.”

Another new thing about these modes is the bottom-up nature of the changes that users of private transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft (both of which are leaping into the bikesharing and e-scooter markets) impose on the city. “These mobility options are from private companies that are decentralized—they don’t have strong ties to place,”

“

And when people are making [the wrong] choices so they don’t die, we’re not doing something right. says Iannarone. But much like TNCs, an overnight supply of e-scooters presents an option people hadn’t thought about which provides a better chance to shift habits compared to other consumer-driven mode choices. “I’m making a choice to take transit, ride my bicycle, or buy a car. But [scooters are] dropped in on us.”

Just as ride-hailing-related traffic patterns have have scrambled the once-predictable demand for curb space and drop-off lanes, the arrival of scooters and other low-speed minivehicles has exposed new questions about why and where we separate road users. While that makes things tricky for planners, it does open up the space where action on redesigning streets is possible, especially as safety challenges on the road spill into sidewalks. “I’m a pretty confident bike rider but pop

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onto the sidewalk because there’s no room for me given urban congestion,” she says. “I don’t really think scooter people want to be on sidewalks, either. Sidewalks are slower, there’s a lot more obstacles going to impede their ability to enjoy and be efficient with their ride. They’re doing it so they don’t die. And when people are making [the wrong] choices so they don’t die, we’re not doing something right.”

The opportunity, she adds, doesn’t necessarily mean making more specialized lanes, or even rebranding the existing ones. It could just be opening a conversation about using road space in distinctly non-American ways—think superblocks, shared woonerf-style streets, and pedestrian-friendly space. “We could cut up streets to make safer allocations of space.

What would it look like to have a grid across the street that was just for individual mobility? Think about we could save money doing that instead of fighting to take away parking or build new curbs.”

Ultimately, the LIT revolution may be a chance to reconsider why roads have been built the way they have by providing an alternative to the ideology of the car— one that appeals to bigger, broader constituency than the hardcore cyclists and safety advocates who’ve traditionally led the battle against car-centric planning.

“It’s an interesting conundrum. We talk a lot of times about automobile dominance as an ideology, but it’s just a habit too,” Iannarone says. And just about any habit can be broken.

Andrew Small is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., and author of the Curb Daily newsletter.

Illustrations by Vinicius Frahm.

October 2018 CURB | 5

Has Manhattan Become Too...

‘Manhattanized’?

Midtown is a hive of construction, with one luxury tower after another replacing older buildings.

What’s being lost?

by Sarah Goodyear 6 | CURB October 2018

T

here’s a word to describe the worrying phenomenon of cities getting too dense and tall: Manhattanization. But what happens when Manhattan itself becomes too ...

Manhattanized?

In a city where real estate values are as dizzying as the skyscrapers, the angst over Manhattan’s changing profile and streetscape is becoming louder. The most recent outcry came over the demolition of a five-story building on West 57th Street, former home of Rizzoli Bookstore.

The 2000 edition of the AIA Guide to New York City describes Rizzoli as “a bookshop that feels like a library in a baronial mansion,” and praised its 1985 interior renovation, which preserved many details from its original incarnation as a high-end piano showroom. But after a last-minute review that critics said was cursory and opaque, the Landmarks and Preservation Commission denied protection to its interior or its exterior, and the beloved art and antiquarian book emporium closed its doors on April 11.

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There won’t be anything left to love if we don’t stop this kind of development.

Developers haven’t disclosed their plans for the site, but this stretch in the core of Midtown Manhattan is already a hive of construction, with one luxury tower after another replacing older buildings, many of which have their own fans.

Some of the skyscrapers under construction soar as high as 75 stories. Apartments with stellar views of Central Park, many selling to foreign investors, can go for as much as $90 million.

It’s a transformation that has been hailed by those who want to see the entire neighborhood reinvented, like Nikolai Fedak, who blogs at New York YIMBY (as in, “Yes in my backyard”).

The 9/11 memorial. © Vinicius Frahm

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The change dismays many who believe that a core neighborhood of New York is being gutted of its character (there are also concerns about the shadows some of these mega highrises will cast on Central Park). “There won’t be anything left to love if we don’t stop this kind of development,” State Senator Liz Krueger said during a rally protesting the Rizzoli building’s pending demolition. “It’s a sad day because we’ve already lost this one.”

October 2018 CURB | 7

A new hope Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer is one of the New York politicians leading the call for preservation of New York’s historic architecture. Brewer is working on legislation that would make the landmarks review process more consistent, requiring a pre-demolition 30-day review of any building more than 50 years old, with provision for public comment.

“The processes need to be much clearer,” says Brewer. “We shouldn’t just lose these buildings without a discussion.”

Brewer is a longtime preservationist who has worked to hang onto the infrastructure of a less homogenized New York. As a member of the City Council representing the Upper West Side, she was instrumental in crafting a 2012 zoning change that limited the width of storefronts on the popular neighborhood’s commercial streets, which helped protect the mom-and-pop retailers rapidly being priced out by deep-pocketed banks and chain outlets that wanted to rent the spacious ground floors of the new breed of condo building.

is going to hold onto the very things that make it such a desirable place to live and work – a lively pedestrian environment, idiosyncratic retail outlets, and small neighborhood businesses.

“There are no easy answers,” Brewer says. “But we need a sense of place, a sense of history. I speak for Manhattanites. We don’t want to lose everything.”

Sarah Goodyear is a Brooklyn-based contributing writer to CityLab. She’s written about cities for a variety of publications, including Grist and Streetsblog.

“We cannot be successful as a neighborhood if it’s all banks, and that’s what it’s becoming,” Brewer told the New York Times then. “We have to put a halt to it.”

Regular storefronts in much of the Upper West Side are now capped at 40 feet in width, while bank branches – which are legion in that upscale part of town – can be no wider than 25 feet.

“

There are no easy answers. But we need a sense of place, a sense of history.

The objections Brewer acknowledges that her preservationist tendencies have garnered plenty of criticism from those who see her as anti-growth. But she rejects that characterization.

A longtime booster of the city’s tech community, Brewer gives the example of East Midtown, where, she acknowledges, “those buildings need an upgrade” to accommodate the workplaces of the present-day – and the future.

Brewer says she knows that change, and destruction of the old, are part of the New York ecosystem. She also acknowledges that Manhattan has its own particular challenges, because of intense development pressure, that are not always shared by other places. But she believes the process of evaluating which buildings are worth preserving needs to be more consistent and more open if the city

8 | CURB October 2018

Wall Steet. © Vinicius Frahm

EDITOR’S LETTER

The digital signpost in display at Sidney. © Vinicius Frahm

A signpost for the digital age One design firm’s remedy for the ubiquitous touch screen.

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or designers looking to incorporate the virtual realm into public space, the dominant approach in recent years has also been the simplest: add a touchscreen.

For the team at BREAKFAST, a Brooklyn-based firm on the hunt for better ways to connect the real and online worlds, the prevalence of screens represents a missed opportunity. “Everyone has learned to ignore them,” says Andrew Zolty, BREAKFAST’s creative director. The screen’s versatility is unparalleled (and sometimes intimidating), but its novelty has faded, he argues.

Points, BREAKFAST’s latest creation, embeds digital way-finding technology in the familiar shape of a signpost. In action, though, the sleek black aluminum body and rotating arms encrusted with 16,000 LEDs are anything but old-fashioned. With its location technology and scrolling text, Points is what a signpost might look like at Hogwarts.

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BREAKFAST sees Points as a flashy, fun and useful addition to a concert, conference or other public event, pointing the way to various activities as they happen.

Nine feet high and with a six-foot wingspan, Points can swing its three arms in any direction, changing their display on command. It can also handle a flow of geotagged information in real time, displaying, say, the latest Olympic event results as each race or game progresses. A panel on the post lets passersby choose between different display categories.

A video of a Points demo on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, posted last week, has already been viewed more than 100,000 times, and Zolty says BREAKFAST has received inquiries from cities, conferences, shopping centers, theme parks, and more from around the globe.

But don’t get your hopes up to have Points in your kitchen, pointing the way to the afternoon activities of your three children. The cost of renting the device, which has been manufactured and fine-tuned over the past three years in BREAKFAST’s workshop in Brooklyn, will start in the low five figures. At some point, if demand picks up, that price could drop and you might start seeing Points for sale.

Henry Grabar is a freelance writer and former fellow at Curb. He lives in New York.

October 2018 CURB | 9

EDITOR’S LETTER

on graffiti One way to look through this revolving discussion is giving the messages across the wall a second read.

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rom time to time, the discussion on the value graffiti resurfaces. It’s art, some will say. It’s an infraction, some will reply. The truth is that in big cities, it will always happen to some degree, no matter what might be done. Which is a good reason to take a step back, and see what graffiti brings to the table.

There’s too much people in urban areas to all of their voices to be heard. As much equality as democracy brought to society, not everyone has a say. And graffiti,

right or wrong, is some of that need for expression leaking into the streets. So while it might not always be art, it’s often a symptom of an existential deficiency.

There’s plenty of graffiti in Brazil, and especially in São Paulo, a twelve-million people city and probably the greatest concrete jungle this side of the world. Maybe that’s why, in Brazil, there are two words for graffiti. ‘Graffiti’ itself is its most artistic examples, like murals. But the transgressive, usually gang-related iteration is called ‘pichação’. Most people will say they only approve of the first, as the latter plagues walls all over the country. Some won’t differentiate - everything is ‘pichação’.

One of them is the ex-mayor of São Paulo, João Dória, who launched a project called ‘Beautiful City’ to paint over ‘graffiti’ and ‘pichação’ alike, some of them famous.

This brought the discussion to the spotlight once again, and one might guess which side won if told that Dória was recently elected Governor.

However you categorize it, graffiti is like a tridimensional chart of a society’s inequality. São Paulo, with graffiti even up vacant 20-store buildings, is more unequal than New York, where an example might even be an art reference.

Beyond the spiralling discussion of right or wrong, look at what it means, and hopefully you’ll find it’s much more than just paint in a wall.

Vinicius Frahm is a designer in London, ON, and creator of Curb.

Graffiti in Brooklyn © Vinicius Frahm

10 | CURB October 2018

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